Deacon nearly collapsed to one knee as a fresh wave of dizziness suddenly rolled through him, and his fingers spasmed for a moment as he began to steady himself against the stone base of the second pillar. "This is either a neurotoxin or a slow-reacting hemotoxin… But I can't be sure, who knows what else these zealot fucks have in here?"
The air was thick now, and every breath he took felt like he was dragging hot needles into his lungs. Below him, the once-visible floor was now a churning sea of noxious black smoke, four feet high, and it looked to be still rising.
Shit…
Gritting his teeth, Deacon pushed himself back onto both legs and pressed both palms against the face of the second pillar, shoving mana into it without hesitation.
The sigils glowed again, same faint cerulean as the first, and the rotating face clicked beneath his hands, shifting from a jaguar to a monkey.
He removed his hand and stopped funneling his mana into the pillar for a few tense seconds.
Nothing happened.
"C'mon…," he rasped, sweat beading on his brow beneath the mask as he placed his hands back on the pillar's face in front of him and began funneling his mana into it again. The image of the monkey scratching its armpit and stomach lit up briefly before he pushed the face aside, revealing the image of a panda that appeared to be performing a crane form from kung fu.
What type of crane form is that? He asked himself as he stopped funneling mana into the pillar and put away his hands, just as a groan of stone could be heard above him.
With said mechanical groan, a panel above the central pillar slid open, and from it descended a thick, knotted vine. It swayed in front of him slightly at its end pooled beside the pillar.
Deacon stared at it for a second, stunned. "...You've got to be kidding me. Why would this be the panda? Why not the monkey? Monkeys swing on vines, not pandas."
Muttering a few more obscenities under his breath, Deacon grabbed the vine and wrapped it tight around his forearm, testing its strength with a couple of tugs. It held firm.
He stepped to the edge of the platform and peered across the room, kicking the pooled up end of the vine off the platform edge to get a better look.
The vine was long, really long, and it would be able to help him swing to one of the footholds that led to the last remaining pillar on the ceiling of the chamber.
"Alright, alright," he coughed, voice barely audible through the mask as he kicked off the platform, "no better option."
The vine jerked taut with a sharp snap, and his body cut through the air like a pendulum, legs extended, boots mere meters above the sea of noxious black rising poison gas that swallowed the entirety of the chamber floor. The thick braid of vine hissed against the pulley above as it strained to hold his weight, fibers groaning from the sudden tension.
Wind whipped past his face as gravity and momentum hurled him back and forward across the massive chamber.
His heart slammed against his ribs, the rush of motion nearly making him see the general outline of things around him turn wobbly. However, it wasn't due to how fast he was moving – he'd moved far faster numerous times before. The overwhelming sensation came from the poison seeping into his skin.
He reached the arc of his swing – and let go.
For a heartbeat, Deacon was weightless.
Then his boots slammed hard against the stone foothold. He hit low and heavily as his right shoulder slammed into a foothold and was barely able to catch the ledge with both hands.
– or rather, with one.
His left hand failed to close.
A searing jolt of numbness shot up his arm, and his left hand's fingers twitched uselessly against the stone as his left side gave out entirely. His body lurched. He dangled suddenly from just his right arm, legs scrabbling against the wall for purchase, breath caught in his throat.
"Fuck!" he hissed, the curse barely audible over the roar in his ears.
His left arm hung limp beside him like a dead weight, the delayed paralysis, the creeping numbness, the loss of motor control… It was a neurotoxin.
There was no time to dig through the bag, no physical way to do it with one hand, the only hand that was holding him from falling into a sea of noxious black poison gas below that was ever growing.
Gritting his teeth, Deacon shifted his weight and began to climb, using nothing but his mana-enhanced right arm and legs.
The pain came almost immediately as fire lanced up his right side as he hauled himself upward, fingers locking onto stone edges slick with moisture.
His boots scraped for purchase against narrow grooves in the wall, occasionally making his heart drop sharply as he missed a foothold to stand on, but with the stability from his other two limbs, he'd be able to get that leg onto it.
His left arm swung limply beside him, it was a dead weight that constantly pulled at his balance with every motion he made… Was it wrong for him to debate chopping it off? He could regrow it after overhealing on a Health Potion.
His breath came in ragged and wet gasps, which rendered the parchment mask useless as it began to tear apart from how wet it became. As it fell off his face, the toxic air, now not facing any resistance whatsoever, freely burned his throat, causing his vision to pulse at the edges, causing him to second-guess every foothold he needed to climb to.
But he didn't stop. He couldn't.
His hand just reached a foothold just a few feet below the inverted pillar and nearly lost his grip on it as his right arm now began to tremble, and his head was pounding, filling his ears with what sounded like a war drum.
The toxin was winning. It was setting his entire nervous system alight with paralyzing numbness.
Deacon closed his eyes and focused, sending out two thin threads of mana from his chest. The glowing tendrils slithered through the air and dived into the folds of his still open Spatial Sling Bag strapped tight across his back. They moved with practiced precision, rifling through the countless contents within, until they emerged clutching a small vial filled with a faintly glowing teal liquid – Poison Resistance Potion: Neurotoxin.
System bless Sam and Esmerelda's help with my mana manipulation training.
He guided it to his lips with the same mana threads and popped the cork with a snap.
The taste was bitter. Metallic. Like ground herbs mixed with an old coin. But he drank every drop.
He could feel it almost instantly; the burning in his throat began to dull, the stabbing pain in his lungs receded to a low thrum, and most importantly, a tingling returned to his left arm.
Pins and needles… who would have ever thought that they'd miss that feeling, he thought to himself as he pressed his head against the surprisingly cool stone foothold, letting it cool his sweaty and warm head for a couple of seconds.
Only when he was able to regain the ability to clench the fingers in his left hand did he continue to climb, absentmindedly letting the mana strings drag the empty potion bottle into his Spatial Sling Bag, but also letting the cork fall into the rising noxious black neurotoxin gas as he couldn't expend all his mental energy to keeping both objects held up at once at the moment.
He reached up with both hands now, climbed the last few feet, and slammed his palm onto the face of the upside-down pillar and infused it with mana, causing a cerulean colored panda to spark to life beneath his touch.
Canceling the flow of his mana, Deacon waited for a few more seconds in the silence before placing it back on the pillar and reinfusing it with his mana and turning its face to now show the monkey that was scratching both its armpit and stomach before removing his hand and cutting off the mana flow.
A low rumble echoed through the chamber as all three pillars with their respective jungle animals on them began to glow cerulean.
Yes…
From across the room, beyond the veil of poison smoke, the bars guarding the exit began to descend, grinding deep into the stone floor with a heavy, satisfying clunk.
He exhaled a long and shaky breath.
"Fuck these Aztec religious zealots and their bullshit trap rooms," he muttered as he began to quickly scale down the wall.
Deacon stared down into the roiling sea of noxious black neurotoxin below that rose to 10 feet in height now.
There was only one way he would reach the doorway that was now obscured by said neurotoxin gas.
He took a deep breath, deep enough to hurt his chest, as his lungs expanded themselves to their limits.
Then, without another thought, he jumped.
The world dropped out from beneath him. Wind clawed at his ears as the ten-meter fall narrowed to seconds. He slammed into the stone below, hard, but he was already moving, tucking into a shoulder roll that carried his momentum and spared his knees from aching for four days straight.
It wasn't all bad, all things considered. He'd been dropped from a slightly shorter height back in the academy when he hadn't had the stats he currently had. Albeit, he'd end up with a broken arm or something popped out of place when he did, but he'd get it quickly fixed by popping into the infirmary and grabbing a potion from Bonehead.
He pushed off the ground and broke into a sprint, legs pumping through the sea of black neurotoxin gas that hissed against his skin and covered almost everything in sight.
His eyes watered from the sting of the neurotoxin gas as he ran blindly toward the first pillar, the one that had the cerulean jaguar baring its fangs at him, the only light visible within the noxious black gas that surrounded him.
Deacon shot forward, ignoring the feeling of his lungs burning, muscles screaming, and skin prickling with every second of contact with the neurotoxin gas, instead focusing on the glowing cerulean jaguar on the pillar ahead.
He didn't slow.
He couldn't.
As he reached the pillar, he continued rushing past it, straight into the open doorway behind it.
The moment he crossed the threshold, it felt as though he'd slammed into a wall of slime that swallowed him the instant he touched it. And as his body entered it fully, he felt as though thick molasses clung to his body as he pushed through, resisting every centimeter of forward motion.
It dragged against his limbs like a dozen hands trying to hold him back, its gelatinous surface pulsing faintly against his skin. For a brief, horrifying second, he thought he was trapped inside it – that he'd missed something that he needed to do before passing through the doorway.
Then, with a sickening, yet oddly satisfying squelch, the membrane gave way and let him fall through.
Deacon stumbled and landed on one knee, eyes blinking rapidly as his vision was still watering and rimmed with red from the poison.
No poison gas, he realized with the lack of black that was surrounding him seconds ago, causing him to let out the breath he was holding in, and take in the air around him
Oh sweet, sweet air, Deacon sighed in relief as he felt the Neurotoxin Poison Resistance Potion finally able to focus entirely on the poison already inside him, no longer forced to split its effects pushing out the toxins that had tried to seep into his skin when he plunged into the sea of neurotoxic gas and sprinted across the massive chamber to reach the exit.
Turning his head back, he saw the noxious black neurotoxin gas churn hungrily just centimeters beyond the translucent film that now sealed the doorway behind him.
Looking down to look at his arm, Deacon still saw the Silver Binding of Huitzilopochtli still on his wrist. "What type of shit did the slaves of Huitzilopochtli have to do if this was the first trial they needed to go through to escape?"